Self-supervised pre-training of transformer models has revolutionized NLP applications. Such pre-training with language modeling objectives provides a useful initial point for parameters that generalize well to new tasks with fine-tuning. However, fine-tuning is still data inefficient -- when there are few labeled examples, accuracy can be low. Data efficiency can be improved by optimizing pre-training directly for future fine-tuning with few examples; this can be treated as a meta-learning problem. However, standard meta-learning techniques require many training tasks in order to generalize; unfortunately, finding a diverse set of such supervised tasks is usually difficult. This paper proposes a self-supervised approach to generate a large, rich, meta-learning task distribution from unlabeled text. This is achieved using a cloze-style objective, but creating separate multi-class classification tasks by gathering tokens-to-be blanked from among only a handful of vocabulary terms. This yields as many unique meta-training tasks as the number of subsets of vocabulary terms. We meta-train a transformer model on this distribution of tasks using a recent meta-learning framework. On 17 NLP tasks, we show that this meta-training leads to better few-shot generalization than language-model pre-training followed by finetuning. Furthermore, we show how the self-supervised tasks can be combined with supervised tasks for meta-learning, providing substantial accuracy gains over previous supervised meta-learning.
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）
This paper addresses the problem of key phrase extraction from sentences. Existing state-of-the-art supervised methods require large amounts of annotated data to achieve good performance and generalization. Collecting labeled data is, however, often expensive. In this paper, we redefine the problem as question-answer extraction, and present SAMIE: Self-Asking Model for Information Ixtraction, a semi-supervised model which dually learns to ask and to answer questions by itself. Briefly, given a sentence $s$ and an answer $a$, the model needs to choose the most appropriate question $\hat q$; mea…
In this work we propose a HyperTransformer, a Transformer-based model for supervised and semi-supervised few-shot learning that generates weights of a convolutional neural network (CNN) directly from support samples. Since the dependence of a small generated CNN model on a specific task is encoded by a high-capacity Transformer model, we effectively decouple the complexity of the large task space from the complexity of individual tasks. Our method is particularly effective for small target CNN architectures where learning a fixed universal task-independent embedding is not optimal and better p…
KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；NAVER AI Lab（NAVER人工智能实验室）；SNU AIIS（首尔大学人工智能研究所）
Cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL) has drawn increasing attention for handling large differences between the source and target domains--an important concern in real-world scenarios. To overcome these large differences, recent works have considered exploiting small-scale unlabeled data from the target domain during the pre-training stage. This data enables self-supervised pre-training on the target domain, in addition to supervised pre-training on the source domain. In this paper, we empirically investigate which pre-training is preferred based on domain similarity and few-shot difficulty …
University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）；Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute（米拉——魁北克人工智能研究所）
Recent work on few-shot learning \cite{tian2020rethinking} showed that quality of learned representations plays an important role in few-shot classification performance. On the other hand, the goal of self-supervised learning is to recover useful semantic information of the data without the use of class labels. In this work, we exploit the complementarity of both paradigms via a multi-task framework where we leverage recent self-supervised methods as auxiliary tasks. We found that combining multiple tasks is often beneficial, and that solving them simultaneously can be done efficiently. Our re…
We consider the problem of semi-supervised few-shot classification where a classifier needs to adapt to new tasks using a few labeled examples and (potentially many) unlabeled examples. We propose a clustering approach to the problem. The features extracted with Prototypical Networks are clustered using $K$-means with the few labeled examples guiding the clustering process. We note that in many real-world applications the adaptation performance can be significantly improved by requesting the few labels through user feedback. We demonstrate good performance of the active adaptation strategy usi…
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Most approaches in few-shot learning rely on costly annotated data related to the goal task domain during (pre-)training. Recently, unsupervised meta-learning methods have exchanged the annotation requirement for a reduction in few-shot classification performance. Simultaneously, in settings with realistic domain shift, common transfer learning has been shown to outperform supervised meta-learning. Building on these insights and on advances in self-supervised learning, we propose a transfer learning approach which constructs a metric embedding that clusters unlabeled prototypical samples and t…
National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；intelliGo Technology inc.（intelliGo科技公司）
User-defined keyword spotting is a task to detect new spoken terms defined by users. This can be viewed as a few-shot learning problem since it is unreasonable for users to define their desired keywords by providing many examples. To solve this problem, previous works try to incorporate self-supervised learning models or apply meta-learning algorithms. But it is unclear whether self-supervised learning and meta-learning are complementary and which combination of the two types of approaches is most effective for few-shot keyword discovery. In this work, we systematically study these questions b…
Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
Learning from limited exemplars (few-shot learning) is a fundamental, unsolved problem that has been laboriously explored in the machine learning community. However, current few-shot learners are mostly supervised and rely heavily on a large amount of labeled examples. Unsupervised learning is a more natural procedure for cognitive mammals and has produced promising results in many machine learning tasks. In the current study, we develop a method to learn an unsupervised few-shot learner via self-supervised training (UFLST), which can effectively generalize to novel but related classes. The pr…
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Futurewei Technologies；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）
The successful application of deep learning to many visual recognition tasks relies heavily on the availability of a large amount of labeled data which is usually expensive to obtain. The few-shot learning problem has attracted increasing attention from researchers for building a robust model upon only a few labeled samples. Most existing works tackle this problem under the meta-learning framework by mimicking the few-shot learning task with an episodic training strategy. In this paper, we propose a new transfer-learning framework for semi-supervised few-shot learning to fully utilize the auxi…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Qingdao AInnovation Technology Group Co., Ltd（青岛创新奇智科技集团股份有限公司）；Peking University（北京大学）；CICC Alpha (Beijing) Private Equity（中金资本（北京）私募股权投资）
Semi-supervised few-shot learning consists in training a classifier to adapt to new tasks with limited labeled data and a fixed quantity of unlabeled data. Many sophisticated methods have been developed to address the challenges this problem comprises. In this paper, we propose a simple but quite effective approach to predict accurate negative pseudo-labels of unlabeled data from an indirect learning perspective, and then augment the extremely label-constrained support set in few-shot classification tasks. Our approach can be implemented in just few lines of code by only using off-the-shelf op…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Institute for Artificial Intelligence（人工智能研究院）
We present a Few-Shot Relation Classification Dataset (FewRel), consisting of 70, 000 sentences on 100 relations derived from Wikipedia and annotated by crowdworkers. The relation of each sentence is first recognized by distant supervision methods, and then filtered by crowdworkers. We adapt the most recent state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods for relation classification and conduct a thorough evaluation of these methods. Empirical results show that even the most competitive few-shot learning models struggle on this task, especially as compared with humans. We also show that a range of d…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Helmholtz AI, Helmholtz Center Munich（亥姆霍兹人工智能，亥姆霍兹慕尼黑中心）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
Recent progress has shown that few-shot learning can be improved with access to unlabelled data, known as semi-supervised few-shot learning(SS-FSL). We introduce an SS-FSL approach, dubbed as Prototypical Random Walk Networks(PRWN), built on top of Prototypical Networks (PN). We develop a random walk semi-supervised loss that enables the network to learn representations that are compact and well-separated. Our work is related to the very recent development of graph-based approaches for few-shot learning. However, we show that compact and well-separated class representations can be achieved by …
Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad（印度理工学院海得拉巴分校）；Department of Computer Science & Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）
The increased availability of massive point clouds coupled with their utility in a wide variety of applications such as robotics, shape synthesis, and self-driving cars has attracted increased attention from both industry and academia. Recently, deep neural networks operating on labeled point clouds have shown promising results on supervised learning tasks like classification and segmentation. However, supervised learning leads to the cumbersome task of annotating the point clouds. To combat this problem, we propose two novel self-supervised pre-training tasks that encode a hierarchical partit…
Learning a new task from a handful of examples remains an open challenge in machine learning. Despite the recent progress in few-shot learning, most methods rely on supervised pretraining or meta-learning on labeled meta-training data and cannot be applied to the case where the pretraining data is unlabeled. In this study, we present an unsupervised few-shot learning method via deep Laplacian eigenmaps. Our method learns representation from unlabeled data by grouping similar samples together and can be intuitively interpreted by random walks on augmented training data. We analytically show how…
Self-Supervised and Few-Shot Learning for Robust Bioaerosol Monitoring
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts（卢塞恩应用科学与艺术大学）；Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss（瑞士联邦气象与气候学办公室（瑞士气象局））；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；University of Basel（巴塞尔大学）；Swisens AG（斯维森斯公司）
Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to learn novel visual categories from very few samples, which is a challenging problem in real-world applications. Many methods of few-shot classification work well on general images to learn global representation. However, they can not deal with fine-grained categories well at the same time due to a lack of subtle and local information. We argue that localization is an efficient approach because it directly provides the discriminative regions, which is critical for both general classification and fine-grained classification in a low data regime. In this paper, we …
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Texas A&M University（得克萨斯农工大学）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）
Graphs are widely used to model the relational structure of data, and the research of graph machine learning (ML) has a wide spectrum of applications ranging from drug design in molecular graphs to friendship recommendation in social networks. Prevailing approaches for graph ML typically require abundant labeled instances in achieving satisfactory results, which is commonly infeasible in real-world scenarios since labeled data for newly emerged concepts (e.g., new categorizations of nodes) on graphs is limited. Though meta-learning has been applied to different few-shot graph learning problems…
Learning from a few examples is a challenging task for machine learning. While recent progress has been made for this problem, most of the existing methods ignore the compositionality in visual concept representation (e.g. objects are built from parts or composed of semantic attributes), which is key to the human ability to easily learn from a small number of examples. To enhance the few-shot learning models with compositionality, in this paper we present the simple yet powerful Compositional Feature Aggregation (CFA) module as a weakly-supervised regularization for deep networks. Given the de…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST)（蔚山科学技术院）
Few-shot learning aims to handle previously unseen tasks using only a small amount of new training data. In preparing (or meta-training) a few-shot learner, however, massive labeled data are necessary. In the real world, unfortunately, labeled data are expensive and/or scarce. In this work, we propose a few-shot learner that can work well under the semi-supervised setting where a large portion of training data is unlabeled. Our method employs explicit task-conditioning in which unlabeled sample clustering for the current task takes place in a new projection space different from the embedding f…
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais（米纳斯吉拉斯联邦大学）；University of São Paulo（圣保罗大学）；Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul（南马托格罗索联邦大学）
Semantic segmentation is a classic computer vision task with multiple applications, which includes medical and remote sensing image analysis. Despite recent advances with deep-based approaches, labeling samples (pixels) for training models is laborious and, in some cases, unfeasible. In this paper, we present two novel meta learning methods, named WeaSeL and ProtoSeg, for the few-shot semantic segmentation task with sparse annotations. We conducted extensive evaluation of the proposed methods in different applications (12 datasets) in medical imaging and agricultural remote sensing, which are …
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Few-shot classification is the task of predicting the category of an example from a set of few labeled examples. The number of labeled examples per category is called the number of shots (or shot number). Recent works tackle this task through meta-learning, where a meta-learner extracts information from observed tasks during meta-training to quickly adapt to new tasks during meta-testing. In this formulation, the number of shots exploited during meta-training has an impact on the recognition performance at meta-test time. Generally, the shot number used in meta-training should match the one us…
Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）
State of the art (SOTA) few-shot learning (FSL) methods suffer significant performance drop in the presence of domain differences between source and target datasets. The strong discrimination ability on the source dataset does not necessarily translate to high classification accuracy on the target dataset. In this work, we address this cross-domain few-shot learning (CDFSL) problem by boosting the generalization capability of the model. Specifically, we teach the model to capture broader variations of the feature distributions with a novel noise-enhanced supervised autoencoder (NSAE). NSAE tra…
Few-shot learning aims to generalize unseen classes that appear during testing but are unavailable during training. Prototypical networks incorporate few-shot metric learning, by constructing a class prototype in the form of a mean vector of the embedded support points within a class. The performance of prototypical networks in extreme few-shot scenarios (like one-shot) degrades drastically, mainly due to the desuetude of variations within the clusters while constructing prototypes. In this paper, we propose to replace the typical prototypical loss function with an Episodic Triplet Mining (ETM…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Univ Rennes（雷恩大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；IRISA（法国雷恩信息与自动化系统研究所）
Few-shot learning amounts to learning representations and acquiring knowledge such that novel tasks may be solved with both supervision and data being limited. Improved performance is possible by transductive inference, where the entire test set is available concurrently, and semi-supervised learning, where more unlabeled data is available. Focusing on these two settings, we introduce a new algorithm that leverages the manifold structure of the labeled and unlabeled data distribution to predict pseudo-labels, while balancing over classes and using the loss value distribution of a limited-capac…
Few-Shot Learning is the challenge of training a model with only a small amount of data. Many solutions to this problem use meta-learning algorithms, i.e. algorithms that learn to learn. By sampling few-shot tasks from a larger dataset, we can teach these algorithms to solve new, unseen tasks. This document reports my work on meta-learning algorithms for Few-Shot Computer Vision. This work was done during my internship at Sicara, a French company building image recognition solutions for businesses. It contains: 1. an extensive review of the state-of-the-art in few-shot computer vision; 2. a be…
We present a technique to improve the transferability of deep representations learned on small labeled datasets by introducing self-supervised tasks as auxiliary loss functions. While recent approaches for self-supervised learning have shown the benefits of training on large unlabeled datasets, we find improvements in generalization even on small datasets and when combined with strong supervision. Learning representations with self-supervised losses reduces the relative error rate of a state-of-the-art meta-learner by 5-25% on several few-shot learning benchmarks, as well as off-the-shelf deep…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
A variety of machine learning applications expect to achieve rapid learning from a limited number of labeled data. However, the success of most current models is the result of heavy training on big data. Meta-learning addresses this problem by extracting common knowledge across different tasks that can be quickly adapted to new tasks. However, they do not fully explore weakly-supervised information, which is usually free or cheap to collect. In this paper, we show that weakly-labeled data can significantly improve the performance of meta-learning on few-shot classification. We propose prototyp…
Lanzhou University of Technology（兰州理工大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Few-shot meta-learning has been recently reviving with expectations to mimic humanity's fast adaption to new concepts based on prior knowledge. In this short communication, we give a concise review on recent representative methods in few-shot meta-learning, which are categorized into four branches according to their technical characteristics. We conclude this review with some vital current challenges and future prospects in few-shot meta-learning.
We study few-shot acoustic event detection (AED) in this paper. Few-shot learning enables detection of new events with very limited labeled data. Compared to other research areas like computer vision, few-shot learning for audio recognition has been under-studied. We formulate few-shot AED problem and explore different ways of utilizing traditional supervised methods for this setting as well as a variety of meta-learning approaches, which are conventionally used to solve few-shot classification problem. Compared to supervised baselines, meta-learning models achieve superior performance, thus s…
The aim of all Question Answering (QA) systems is to be able to generalize to unseen questions. Current supervised methods are reliant on expensive data annotation. Moreover, such annotations can introduce unintended annotator bias which makes systems focus more on the bias than the actual task. In this work, we propose Knowledge Triplet Learning (KTL), a self-supervised task over knowledge graphs. We propose heuristics to create synthetic graphs for commonsense and scientific knowledge. We propose methods of how to use KTL to perform zero-shot QA and our experiments show considerable improvem…
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究所）；Meta AI
Self-supervised pretraining has made few-shot learning possible for many NLP tasks. But the pretraining objectives are not typically adapted specifically for in-context few-shot learning. In this paper, we propose to use self-supervision in an intermediate training stage between pretraining and downstream few-shot usage with the goal to teach the model to perform in-context few shot learning. We propose and evaluate four self-supervised objectives on two benchmarks. We find that the intermediate self-supervision stage produces models that outperform strong baselines. Ablation study shows that …
Can we get existing language models and refine them for zero-shot commonsense reasoning? This paper presents an initial study exploring the feasibility of zero-shot commonsense reasoning for the Winograd Schema Challenge by formulating the task as self-supervised refinement of a pre-trained language model. In contrast to previous studies that rely on fine-tuning annotated datasets, we seek to boost conceptualization via loss landscape refinement. To this end, we propose a novel self-supervised learning approach that refines the language model utilizing a set of linguistic perturbations of simi…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Amazon.com Inc（亚马逊公司）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）
Few-Shot Text Classification (FSTC) imitates humans to learn a new text classifier efficiently with only few examples, by leveraging prior knowledge from historical tasks. However, most prior works assume that all the tasks are sampled from a single data source, which cannot adapt to real-world scenarios where tasks are heterogeneous and lie in different distributions. As such, existing methods may suffer from their globally knowledge-shared mechanisms to handle the task heterogeneity. On the other hand, inherent task relation are not explicitly captured, making task knowledge unorganized and …
Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；NASK - National Research Institute（NASK国家研究所）
This paper presents an analysis regarding an influence of the Distance Metric Learning (DML) loss functions on the supervised fine-tuning of the language models for classification tasks. We experimented with known datasets from SentEval Transfer Tasks. Our experiments show that applying the DML loss function can increase performance on downstream classification tasks of RoBERTa-large models in few-shot scenarios. Models fine-tuned with the use of SoftTriple loss can achieve better results than models with a standard categorical cross-entropy loss function by about 2.89 percentage points from 0…
CUHK-Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）；Pengcheng Lab（鹏城实验室）
Few-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) is a realistic problem that trains the DST model with limited labeled data. Existing few-shot methods mainly transfer knowledge learned from external labeled dialogue data (e.g., from question answering, dialogue summarization, machine reading comprehension tasks, etc.) into DST, whereas collecting a large amount of external labeled data is laborious, and the external data may not effectively contribute to the DST-specific task. In this paper, we propose a few-shot DST framework called CSS, which Combines Self-training and Self-supervised learning methods…
Intent classification (IC) and slot filling (SF) are two fundamental tasks in modern Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems. Collecting and annotating large amounts of data to train deep learning models for such systems is not scalable. This problem can be addressed by learning from few examples using fast supervised meta-learning techniques such as prototypical networks. In this work, we systematically investigate how contrastive learning and unsupervised data augmentation methods can benefit these existing supervised meta-learning pipelines for jointly modelled IC/SF tasks. Through ext…
Samsung R&D Institute India - Bangalore（三星印度研发研究院-班加罗尔）
We propose a comprehensive end-to-end pipeline for Twitter hashtags recommendation system including data collection, supervised training setting and zero shot training setting. In the supervised training setting, we have proposed and compared the performance of various deep learning architectures, namely Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Transformer Network. However, it is not feasible to collect data for all possible hashtag labels and train a classifier model on them. To overcome this limitation, we propose a Zero Shot Learning (ZSL) paradigm for predicti…
We study several methods for full or partial sharing of the decoder parameters of multilingual NMT models. We evaluate both fully supervised and zero-shot translation performance in 110 unique translation directions using only the WMT 2019 shared task parallel datasets for training. We use additional test sets and re-purpose evaluation methods recently used for unsupervised MT in order to evaluate zero-shot translation performance for language pairs where no gold-standard parallel data is available. To our knowledge, this is the largest evaluation of multi-lingual translation yet conducted in …
iFLYTEK Research（科大讯飞研究院）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Multilingual pre-trained language models (MPLMs) not only can handle tasks in different languages but also exhibit surprising zero-shot cross-lingual transferability. However, MPLMs usually are not able to achieve comparable supervised performance on rich-resource languages compared to the state-of-the-art monolingual pre-trained models. In this paper, we aim to improve the multilingual model's supervised and zero-shot performance simultaneously only with the resources from supervised languages. Our approach is based on transferring knowledge from high-performance monolingual models with a tea…
Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP)（普适知识处理实验室（UKP））；Department of Computer Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学计算机科学系）；www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de（www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de（注：该网址非机构，按要求不应提取，此处原数据可能有误））
We study the zero-shot transfer capabilities of text matching models on a massive scale, by self-supervised training on 140 source domains from community question answering forums in English. We investigate the model performances on nine benchmarks of answer selection and question similarity tasks, and show that all 140 models transfer surprisingly well, where the large majority of models substantially outperforms common IR baselines. We also demonstrate that considering a broad selection of source domains is crucial for obtaining the best zero-shot transfer performances, which contrasts the s…
Center for Information and Language Processing, LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学信息与语言处理中心）；Sulzer GmbH（苏尔寿有限公司）
Some NLP tasks can be solved in a fully unsupervised fashion by providing a pretrained language model with "task descriptions" in natural language (e.g., Radford et al., 2019). While this approach underperforms its supervised counterpart, we show in this work that the two ideas can be combined: We introduce Pattern-Exploiting Training (PET), a semi-supervised training procedure that reformulates input examples as cloze-style phrases to help language models understand a given task. These phrases are then used to assign soft labels to a large set of unlabeled examples. Finally, standard supervis…
We present a unified system to realize one-shot voice conversion (VC) on the pitch, rhythm, and speaker attributes. Existing works generally ignore the correlation between prosody and language content, leading to the degradation of naturalness in converted speech. Additionally, the lack of proper language features prevents these systems from accurately preserving language content after conversion. To address these issues, we devise a cascaded modular system leveraging self-supervised discrete speech units as language representation. These discrete units provide duration information essential f…
Self-supervised model pre-training has recently garnered significant interest, but relatively few efforts have explored using additional resources in fine-tuning these models. We demonstrate how universal phoneset acoustic models can leverage cross-lingual supervision to improve transfer of pretrained self-supervised representations to new languages. We also show how target-language text can be used to enable and improve fine-tuning with the lattice-free maximum mutual information (LF-MMI) objective. In three low-resource languages these techniques greatly improved few-shot learning performanc…
Penn State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
A universal classification model aims to generalize to diverse classification tasks in both zero and few shot settings. A promising way toward universal classification is to cast heterogeneous data formats into a dataset-agnostic "meta-task" (e.g., textual entailment, question answering) then pretrain a model on the combined meta dataset. The existing work is either pretrained on specific subsets of classification tasks, or pretrained on both classification and generation data but the model could not fulfill its potential in universality and reliability. These also leave a massive amount of an…
Shanghai AI Lab（上海人工智能实验室）；Peking University（北京大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
With increasing scale, large language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities, especially as zero-shot learners, like GPT-3. However, these results rely heavily on delicate prompt design and large computation. In this work, we explore whether the strong zero-shot ability could be achieved at a smaller model scale without any external supervised data. To achieve this goal, we revisit masked language modeling and present a geometry-guided self-supervised learning method (Go-tuningfor short) by taking a small number of task-aware self-supervised data to u…
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems rely on large amounts of parallel data. This is a major challenge for low-resource languages. Building on recent work on unsupervised and semi-supervised methods, we present an approach that combines zero-shot and dual learning. The latter relies on reinforcement learning, to exploit the duality of the machine translation task, and requires only monolingual data for the target language pair. Experiments show that a zero-shot dual system, trained on English-French and English-Spanish, outperforms by large margins a standard NMT system in zero-shot transl…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
Intent classification (IC) and slot filling (SF) are critical building blocks in task-oriented dialogue systems. These two tasks are closely-related and can flourish each other. Since only a few utterances can be utilized for identifying fast-emerging new intents and slots, data scarcity issue often occurs when implementing IC and SF. However, few IC/SF models perform well when the number of training samples per class is quite small. In this paper, we propose a novel explicit-joint and supervised-contrastive learning framework for few-shot intent classification and slot filling. Its highlights…
